It Gets Better, It Gets Worse,

Sometimes I like re-reading old blogs because it reminds me that things get better, even when I read about times I was feeling worse. If there was an uphill from there, there can be one from here, too. You may have read the one about the Mental Health First Aid awareness course, or you may not, or maybe you just don't remember it, but the upshot was it was a difficult day because I had to think about why someone committed suicide and how they did it, and how seven years later, it still hurts that they made that choice. It was a tough day, but it had nothing on the actual practitioner course for me. 

Let me start this by saying that I would never try to dissuade anyone from attending an MHFA practitioner course. There are a lot of people in crisis out there and there are not enough of us. We cannot fix everything, we cannot help everyone, but we can listen and at the moment it could feel like the very opposite of a brief shout into the void (like a small ear to a great cacophony of sound or something similar...) My personal experience of the course was a bit difficult, more than a little bit actually, but at the same time, there was a heck of a lot of value in it. 

So, firstly, I am well aware of the fact that I can be my own worst enemy. Talk about having Generalised Anxiety Disorder can be quite difficult for me sometimes, but I do it. Sometimes I do it because I want to encourage other people to be able to talk about it. Sometimes I do it so that other people can understand what it looks like, or feels like and such. Sometimes I do it because it is the only way that I can tell people what it is I need from them in order to be okay. 

When you're talking about Mental Health in that sort of capacity, people need to know what it looks like hands on. We were really lucky, in some ways, to have people with a few different conditions involved in the course. We all talked about our experiences, our demons, and everything and it helped. Those who don't have problems, or have only experienced short-lived problems in the past made sure we felt safe, and what we were saying was valuable. Well, most of them anyway. 

It's hard because sometimes people are told to get themselves onto one of these courses to try and deal with people better and actually, they then say something stupid that makes the course harder for other people on it. That's kind of what happened to me. 

When I'm upset, or rather my anxiety is running the show, I need to chew things. Mostly it's my nails, or it's gum, hard chocolate or crisps or nuts also works, but I need something tough. I have a clicky thing (like eternal bubble wrap) and I had purposely worn one of my big hoodies that I can just dive inside of, and it's like my own cocoon. I struggled to make anything work right then, but I grabbed as much as I could chew on during the lunch break and then headed back into the room when someone asked me what I wasn't going to eat today. 

Eating disorders are anxiety based. There are times I struggle with food. It can be a consistency issue, it can be a heat thing, a flavour thing and all sorts of other things. Sometimes I have to remind myself to eat. Sometimes I have to remind myself that forcing myself to eat can make me sick, and not eating can make me sick and I have to balance everything against each other and try my hardest to be okay. Sometimes I eat the only things that I know my stomach won't freak out at because anxiety hits my stomach and causes IBS symptoms. I went through a period where I was sick no matter what I ate because of how stressed and anxious I was. If you're wondering how I managed through that, I drank a lot of Lucozade and I struggled. Until I sat in that course, I didn't really talk about it, which was partly because I didn't want people to watch me - I didn't want people to comment on it. I control it pretty damn well; I don't need anyone else looking over me to make sure I'm eating enough and the right things. 

But then someone commented, it was meant to be a joke, about what was I not going to eat today. And suddenly, after just having to listen to someone talking about eating disorders and sitting there chewing my fingernails, feeling like I wasn't sure if I could get through the rest of the session, I was having to think about telling that person, and all of the people that they had said it in front of, that my eating habits were not to be the subject of jokes or discussions, but actually, yes, I struggle with it, and pointing it out only made that even harder. It made for the hardest couple of days I had had in a few months and it made me want to scream. 

I wrote yesterday that I was feeling content, and I was. I felt like today was a good day, and it was, but I have been carrying it around that the comment hurt since it happened and it's hard to shake something like that. I'm hoping that writing it down means I can try and let it go now, even if just a little bit. 

I Hate Writing Blogs Like This,

Blogs like this being the ones that I write because I'm never going to sleep anyway, so might as well do something productive. I didn't used to post them, but now I do.


This morning I woke up and felt much as I have for the last few weeks. I was a bit perkier, I was up a little earlier, and I made an effort to wear something nice and put some lipstick on. These sorts of days are not my good days - my good days tend to be me in jeans and not really caring who objects. Thinking about it right now, they look a lot like my bad days...


Today was supposed to be an easy enough day before going back to the doctors to say to them again those words that I hate - the bad days outnumber the good, my anxiety is the one in the driving seat, I need help. I hate it because it makes me feel weak, I feel the stigma that is being "crazy" or "nuts". I've been called it to my face before, so why would people not say it if they knew I was in therapy or on medication because of an actual problem? It's part of this thing that people do called Catastrophising and I have to stop myself and ask, so what? Even if people do say that, and there is no guarantee that they do, so what? What does it change? Nothing, unless you let that be the reason not to do something about it. 

So, I used the phrase "supposed to be"... Suffice it to say today was not an easy day. 


I never know if it's unfortunate or not that anything at work that says "mental health" and "needs volunteers" I jump at, but it's something which I'm passionate about, so I jump and mostly it works out pretty well. Obviously it's something I have experience of myself, but it's also something I have seen around me a lot, and that only fuels my drive to talk about it, to learn about it, to share knowledge with other people because I whole-heartedly embrace the movement we are making away for a world that says "pull yourself together man!" to a world that allows men to cry over dog rescue videos or two guys to hug without being considered to be overly emotional or gay. Being able to express your emotions, or even just identify them is a big part of mental resilience.

Today was an event where I could learn more about Mental Health First Aid - something that I love as a concept, but in practice it's something that can feel a little bit brutal, and for me the hardest hit, and the one I should have seen coming, was the talk about suicide. I tried to just listen to it, tried to just be a duck and let it all wash over me (though in the context of that course a duck is something slightly different which I might actually write another blog about thinking about it...) but I couldn't. Today was not a day where I felt resilient enough to let it all just roll off of me, so I left the room looking rather frantic with only enough time to say no, I'm not okay over my shoulder when the trainer asked. The only thing I could do right then was extract myself from the situation.

I think if it had just been the stats and the figures, the red flags and how we can step in to prevent over 5000 people a year from taking their own lives I would have been fine. In fact, I know I would. It's hard to talk about, hard to hear, but it's about hope. It's about finding it, showing it, being it, whatever, but the difficult one is when we were discussing how a certain kind of suicide happens. How long it can take. The process of it. And I just broke and now I don't know how to fix myself.

Suicide itself is a tragedy. It doesn't matter who, how or why; it's just brutal for everyone who is left. Most times we forget that. It's easy to forget that in the midst of everything else, particularly when someone has jumped in front of a train and it causes delays. I'm sure everyone has heard someone in a train station telling people how selfish it is because of the impact on everyone else's day. We seem to be able to talk about it in the aftermath, but not before and we need to get better at that. 

Tonight, I don't want to go to sleep because I don't want to see my friend's face. I don't want to have to live through a memory created by a very unhappy bit of my brain and remember how he chose to exit this world, particularly not with this newly gained knowledge of how it happened. Thinking about it when I'm awake is hard enough.